“And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.”

This publishing stuff is like a whole new language to me! I have learned so much in the past 2 days about using OpenOffice (Impress vs Writer) to create an e-book, exporting it as a .pdf document and then uploading it to Lulu.com and getting it ready to be viewed.

To begin with, I originally started with OpenOffice’s Writer program to put this book together, but soon switched to Impress because I couldn’t figure out how to make it look the way that I wanted with Writer. So I did all that work and exported it as a .pdf, ready to upload to WordPress. That wasn’t to be, as WordPress wouldn’t allow such an upload (I have no idea why). So the next step was to find a place where I could upload my .pdf file, then link it to my WordPress site. Oh, yeah, and that other site had to be free…

My cousin Susan has a very busy site, and I was visiting it a few days ago and noticed the e-books she has written and how she has handled them, and that led me to Lulu.com. It is free to set up a “storefront”, so that’s just what I did. The way I understand it, you can upload as much as you want to Lulu and it’s free, unless you plan to have your e-books published. Lulu doesn’t charge you if you sell your ebooks through a download format. If an ebook is published, then Lulu gets 20%. A fair deal, I think. And since I don’t plan to sell my e-books, it’s a perfect fit for me!

So last night I uploaded my e-book to my Lulu storefront and set up the link from this blog. All working fine…

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I needed to “revise” my e-book to make it look a bit more professional. The same size font throughout, images better centered, that sort of thing. A general tidying up was needed.

When I got up this morning, I copy-and-pasted each page back into Writer, then did all of the formatting work to clean it up. A bit of a steep learning curve, but I eventually got everything done the way I wanted. Exported to .pdf and it was back to Lulu!

Finally, I uploaded the revised version just a few minutes ago and and I’m back to the same point as last night! :)

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One thought on “A little revision (already!)”

I downloaded the book to read on my vacation – starting today YEAAAAA. The quick look available at Lulu is quite impressive and I look forward to not only reading it but learning from how you pulled it together.